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5 Most Important Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

With social media marketing strategies in place after careful thought and consideration, businesses can ascertain that their business can progress towards the path of success. The norms of social media will continuously evolve over time. Rather than jumping with both feet, it is pertinent that small businesses should formulate a strategy for interacting with their existing and potential customers. When used in the right way, social media can strengthen relationships at an incredibly lower cost. Although many small business owners get away by saying they do not have the time for social media or do not understand social networks; they are in fact losing on a great opportunity.

Here are five essential tips on social media marketing strategies for your small business. 

1.     Know Where To Find Your Customers

It can be difficult choosing from a plethora of social networks which social platform would be suitable for your business. It is best to research before randomly making a choice based on what everybody else is doing. Dig deeper to find where your customers are crowding and forming online relationships. Since social media is all about the customer. Even if you do not know, you can research and ask your customer what social platforms they normally use. Based on your research, use the right platforms to produce great results.

2.     Talk And Listen To Your Customers

Do not use social media as simply a means to promote your company and products. It is not a one-way street rather a platform where brands can engage in conversations with their customers. Listen to your customers and give out a human feel rather than a cold corporate image. This will greatly help in relationship building and will keep the customers engaged and promote social sharing. Responding to negative comments can be challenging but is essential to work on strains in customer relations. Let go of the corporate tone and converse with the customer on a personal level.

3.     Measure Results

You should measure how your small business is doing as a result of the social media marketing efforts. For instance, you can check which tweets are getting the most re-tweets and which wall post is getting the most likes. Certain metrics can indicate customer behavior and these can be used to set benchmarks for the future. As a small business, you shouldn’t be worried about how many followers big brands have because at the end, enthusiastic and engaging followers matter.

4.     Integrate Social Media With Other Online Tools And Offline Systems

Social media doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Small businesses should integrate their social marketing efforts with Google Analytics, e-commerce systems and their websites. Moreover, the online communication must follow a similar brand consistency as the offline advertising efforts to help the conversion process.

5.     Timing Is Critical

Business is all about people and building relationships .Your business growth depends on how many people are you able to sell your product or services, or in other words, how many people can you reach and how fast???

Facebook and YouTube was an evolution in the Internet space and it just gave way to the New Age marketing which was re-christened “Social Media Marketing”. Today Facebook has more than 900 million active users and YouTube has over 800 million. Businesses today are in the lookout for innovative marketing strategies that is cost effective. With no cost involved for creating a Facebook page or creating a YouTube Account, these social media sites increases the traffic to their websites which improves their presence and branding which leads to a direct impact on the company’s balance sheet.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a step towards Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Hence you need to make effective contents for your business page. It is important for people to get engaged with the right content and an effective content would have effective Keywords. The objective is to get your business, feature on the 1st or 2nd page of Google stack rankings and hence your website, facebook page, Blogs etc should contain the right Keywords to get you on top of the list. Ask yourself the question what my target audience would key in to search my business?

Creating a Face book Page and posting it to your Fans page indeed improves traffic, however we need to figure out what kind out of traffic should be driven to your official page or the Website.  

There is no point in someone who is not from a focus group we target end up liking business account pages who may not even know anything about them. We should be particular about the people who like a business page, however we should not discount on people who are not from a focus group as these may act as word of mouth which may benefit us in some way.